alt Hacker NewsSupercool .. the universe of possibilities really exploded when Borland came out with Turbo Pascal compiler, Turbo C++ and TurboVision.
Compiler performance was superb and the manuals were a work of art - I just wished I had kept all of mine.
This is a cultural treasure.
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The manuals were great. I taught myself C/C++ in the early 90s mostly from the big stack of Borland books that came with Turbo C++. It’s hard to imagine learning something like that these days by simply sitting down and reading reference manuals.
Indeed, except for GW-BASIC and MS-DOS, for me it was Borland all the way.
Turbo BASIC, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++ for MS-DOS and Windows 3.x, Turbo Vision and OWL.
Got into VC+ on version 5, and MFC always felt so lame compared with Borland offerings.
To this day, they don't have anything that can match C++ Builder RAD capabilities, and even with the historic background, it has taken a few years for .NET to get the low level coding and AOT story straight, Delphi like.
We should give Go, C++ and Rust folks a few copies of Turbo Pascal 7 for MS-DOS, and Delphi current.
Turbo Vision for a long time was for me like a golden standard. All the new TUI frameworks seemed like they were missing something.
Now I will get to see if that was just a nostalgia. Gonna use this in the next tool. Huge kudos to the authors <3